ahavafriend

I found this quote of John Piper on Adrian's Blog. Thanks Adrian.

Have you ever heard someone offer the disclaimer "having only an 8th grade education..." to magnify how great a certain accomplishment was, implying the person wasn't that smart but still became a congressmen, etc? Well, for those of you who haven't seen it, the Kansas State 8th Grade Final Exam in 1895 is something that I could not pass today with my Master's degree, nor do I even understand half of the questions! For those who also don't know, Abraham Lincoln had one year of formal education in his entire lifetime. Needless to say, not being "educated" in no way should be equated with being ignorant. This leads me to my real point.

When some Christians read verses in Scripture like Acts 4:13 "When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus", it seems to embolden them to ignore the discipline of studying the Word or wrestling with doctrinal purity. Somehow, ignorance is perceived as innocence, almost child-like; whereas education is seen as a human endeavor to squeeze God into a box, make him manageable, diminish Him and His power by our own cunning and craftiness. In fact, in some circles, going to Seminary (or "cemetery" as it is called in jest), is actually believed to be an obstruction to New Testament-style ministry where faith is the law of the land; and by implication, the “worldly wisdom” that one gets from an education is actually hazardous to faith. How far we have come!

First, let me clarify the "unschooled" nature of the Apostles. These men were very similar to the last generation's "only 8th-grade-educated" citizens. What the average Jew knew of Scripture by the time he turned 12 is shocking. If he did not have the entire first 5 books of the OT (Pentateuch) MEMORIZED, he was at least able to interact with the Law as solidly as any OT scholar today. What is indicated in Acts 4 is that these two men were not teachers of the Law, but fishermen. Their career was not in religion, if you will. But neither was Jesus' - and he would have been considered "unschooled" in his day as well (remember the people were shocked that he spoke with authority, unlike their teachers!). When you hear Peter's sermon on the Day of Pentecost (or Stephen's before he was martyred in Acts 7), you cannot escape the fact that he knew his Scriptures and was able to exegete them on the spot!

Of course, he was empowered by the Holy Spirit, and just as Jesus promised in Luke 12:11,12 “When you are brought before synagogues, rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say”. But this was not facilitated by keeping their minds empty. These men were educated in the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit brought the verses to mind that needed to be spoken. Jesus explained in John 16:13 that the Spirit will only speak what he hears from the Father. The Father has already spoken through the Prophets and the NT authors, and the Spirit will take from the “spoken” Word and enliven it for our hearts and our lives at the moment it is needed. The Spirit may even give specific words for specific people in specific hours of need.

However, this does not excuse the believer from ignoring the admonition to serve the Lord “with all your mind.” God revealed himself to the world, inspired the writing of His Word, and set eternity in the hearts of humanity that we might long for Him. All of this affirms that God desires to be known and has made it possible for us to know Him! Education is extremely biblical and does not limit, but rather enables, the Holy Spirit to move in power among us! Biblical knowledge and the articulate understanding and integration of orthodoxy do not necessarily harden or dry out one’s faith, but rather can lubricate, inflame, and safeguard it. For the first century believers, it was because they knew the Word that they:

May we return to the “biblical norm” of being students and scholars of the Word, regardless of our vocations! If the average Christian today was as “unschooled” as the first-century believers, we might actually see God’s powerful moving among our churches as did they. Even so, come Lord Jesus!

I was doing some surfing on links of other blogs and came across 2 great articles related to the Holy Spirit. The first is an article by Terry Virgo, I believe a pastor somewhere in England, talking about Apostles for today. In part, he states,


So, maybe an Apostle today is a church-planter. Many in ministry feel a particular call to this field. I'm not sure, but it is an interesting thought. Since I believe the gift of the Holy Spirit that was bestowed on the Church at Pentecost was intended to be enjoyed even today, as God's agent in continuing to build and strengthen God's church, Virgo's argument about Apostles for today is quite intriguing. I'll have to give it more thought.

The second article from The Blue Fish Project discusses the promised Holy Spirit's connection to the gospel. In part, the article states,

This is a very interesting emphasis I will need to study further, as well. I thought I would just expose you to these thoughts along with me, for our mutual edification.

What about 1 Cor 14:39?

The Associated Press reported this story last Saturday, June 23, 2007.

Here is a link to Pastor McKissic's blog that has several posts regarding his communication with the Seminary, the SBC position on Tongues, and his views on tongues. How timely that this story was brought to my attention after my last post.

I apologize in advance that this post is equal to a 3-page Word document. I strongly encourage my Christian readers to plow through it and prayerfully reflect on these thoughts.

I recently finished reading again the “Synthesis” of Gordon Fee’s book “God’s Empowering Presence, The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul”. Originally published in 1992, the first section of this work consists of roughly 800 pages of exegetical analysis of every reference to the word “spirit” in Paul’s 13 letters. The second section, the Synthesis, takes almost 120 pages to sift and compose the exegesis into a more digestible format with practical application. Reviews of Fee’s work have been largely positive from a broad spectrum of theologians. His exegesis is sound, and his application, I believe, is very direct and appropriate. Fee explains, “Each word of this title expresses one of my urgencies, because I became convinced they were Paul’s own urgencies…. Thus, the Holy Spirit as person; the person of God himself; the Holy Spirit as God’s personal presence; and the Holy Spirit as God’s empowering presence” (5).

Fee explains one of the reasons for writing such an extensive work was, “by and large the crucial role of the Spirit in Paul’s life and thought – as the dynamic, experiential reality of Christian life – is often either overlooked or given mere lip service. This oversight has sometimes been ‘corrected’ at the popular level by a variety of emphases in various sectors of the church – e.g., some mystics, the holiness movement, the deeper life movement, the Pentecostal movement – but in many instances these lack any sound exegetical base (experience tends to precede exegesis in most cases) or betray inadequate theological reflection” (xxi). As for the contemporary church world, we are so used to discussing the Spirit using the inanimate metaphors in Scripture like wind, oil, fire, or rain, that we forget HE is God. Later in the book, Fee wonders “whether our difficulties do not stem from our own experience of the church and the Spirit, where the Spirit is understood in such nonpersonal ways—as divine “influence” or “power”—that it is a very short step from our experience of the Spirit as a “gray, oblong blur” to our becoming practical binitarians: I believe in God the Father; I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s Son; but I wonder about the Holy Ghost. The Spirit has become God’s specter, if you will, an unseen, less than dynamic, vibrant influence, hardly God very God” (828).

According to Fee, “Probably the one feature that distances the New Testament church the most from its contemporary counterpart is its thoroughly eschatological perspective of all of life. In contrast to most of us, eschatology – a unique understanding of the time of the End – conditioned the early believers’ existence in every way…. They lived ‘between the times’; already the future had begun, not yet had it been consummated. From the New Testament perspective the whole of Christian existence – and theology – has this eschatological ‘tension’ as its basic framework…. The Spirit is thus the central element in this altered perspective, the key to which is Paul’s firm conviction that the Spirit was both the certain evidence that the future had dawned, and the absolute guarantee of its final consummation” (804-806). And I would point out, that this is where the respective theological camps on the Holy Spirit have dug in their tent pegs – one on the side of the “already”, living as if we no longer live under the curse and should experience “all God has for us all the time”; the other on the side of the “not yet”, resisting any hint of something other-worldly/spiritual that exceeds the codified moral teachings of Scripture, now only including the New Testament.

In the section covering Paul’s use of the terms “according to the flesh” and “weakness”, Fee explains that on one side of today’s understanding “is an under-realized eschatological perspective. Even though there is much talk about the Spirit in this view, there is a strong tendency to leave God’s people to ‘slug it out in the trenches’ more or less on their own, with some lip service paid to the Spirit but with little of the Pauline experience of the Spirit as the empowering presence of God. On the other side lie some equally strong tendencies toward triumphalism, especially in a culture like late-twentieth-century America, where pain of any kind is rejected as a from of evil and where suffering is to be avoided at all cost…. And even where power means that believers apprehend and live out the love of Christ in a greater way (Eph 3:16-20), Paul recognizes here a miraculous work of the spirit that will be evidenced by the way renewed people behave toward one another. It is this dynamic, evidential dimension of life in the Spirit that probably more than anything else separates believers in later church history from those in the Pauline churches. Whatever else, the Spirit was experienced in the Pauline churches; he was not merely a matter of creedal assent” (823-825).

“Paul does not see life in the Spirit as the result of a single experience of the Spirit at conversion. The Spirit is the key to all of Christian life, and frequently Paul implies there are further, ongoing appropriations of the Spirit’s empowering…. For Paul life in the Spirit begins at conversion; at the same time that experience is both dynamic and renewable” (864). “Both the community imperative in Eph 5:18 and the individual imperative to Timothy in 2 Tim 1:6-7 imply the need for ongoing appropriation. The Spirit’s presence is the crucial matter, but that presence does not automatically ensure a quickened, fervent spiritual life. Both individuals and the church as a whole are exhorted to keep the gift aflame” (866). “Whatever else ‘life in the Spirit’ meant for Paul, it meant a life devoted to prayer, accompanied by joy and thanksgiving” (868).

As it relates to the miraculous (admittedly the most contentious aspect of any “Spirit” discussion), Fee states “Whether one believes such things happened or not, of course, depends almost altogether on one’s world view. The so-called Enlightenment has had its innings, and moderns, helped along by the phenomenal advances of scientific discovery, are prone to unbridled arrogance, leaving Paul and his churches to their own world view…. Bultmann, for example, speaking for many, caricatured the ‘three-storeyed universe’ of Paul and his contemporaries. So prevalent is this world view that many evangelicals, conservative in their theology and therefore incensed at Butlmann’s ‘rationalism’ which so casually dismissed the Pauline affirmations, adopted their own brand of rationalism, as a way of explaining the absence of such phenomena in their own circles: limiting such Spirit activity to the apostolic age” (887, 888). As to Paul’s understanding of the longevity of the charismatic gifts, it “does not seem possible…that Paul expected the ‘charismata’ to cease within his lifetime, or shortly thereafter. This particular ‘answer’ to the issue is raised not on the basis of reading the biblical text, but from the greater concern as to their ‘legitimacy’ today. But this is a hermeneutical question, pure and simple, and one that Paul could not have understood. His answer is plain: ‘Of course they will continue as long as we await the final consummation.’ Any answer that does not follow in the footsteps of the apostle at this point may hardly appeal to him for support” (893).

Fee sees 8 points that summarize Paul’s perspective:
1) The Spirit plays an absolutely crucial role in Paul’s Christian experience and therefore his understanding of the gospel…. There is no aspect of his theology…in which the Spirit does not play a leading role.
2) Crucial to the Spirit’s central role is the thoroughly eschatological framework within which Paul both experienced and understood the Spirit.
3) Equally crucial to the Pauline perspective is the dynamically experienced nature of the coming of the Spirit in the life of the individual and in the ongoing life of the individual and in the ongoing life of the believing community. This view is fully presuppositional for Paul; it also finds frequent expression, not as something Paul argues for, but from.
4) For Paul the experience of the eschatological Spirit meant the return of God’s own personal presence to dwell in and among his people. The Spirit marks off God’s people corporately and individually as God’s temple, the place of his personal dwelling on earth.
5) Absolutely fundamental to Pauline theology are his Trinitarian presuppositions.
6) Paul’s Trinitarian understanding of God, including the role of the Spirit, is thus foundational to the heart of his theological enterprise—salvation in Christ.
7) The Spirit’s major role in Paul’s view of things lies with his being the absolutely essential constituents of the whole of Christian life, from beginning to end. The Spirit thus empowers ethical life in all of its dimensions—personal, corporate, and global.
8) The Spirit is the key to all truly Christian Spirituality. At the individual level the life of the Spirit includes ‘praying in the Spirit’ as well as in the mind…. At the same time, the Spirit’s presence, including his charismata, helps to build up the believing community as its members gather together to worship God. In Pauline churches, therefore, worship is ‘charismatic’ simply because the Spirit is the key player in all that transpires.

Fee offers several bullet points to explain why this picture of “Pauline churches” faded from the scene. The most prominent one being the silence related to raising 2nd generation believers. After all, the immediate audience of the first Century church was all adult converts who experienced a distinct conversion. “It is of some interest,” says Fee, “that the subsequent study of ‘church history’ by the church itself has far more often been a history of the institution than of the life of the Spirit in the community of faith as it lived out the life of Christ in the world” (900).

“A genuine recapturing of the Pauline perspective will cause the church to be more vitally Trinitarian, not only in its theology, but in its life and Spirituality as well. This will mean not the exaltation of the Spirit, but the exaltation of God; and it will mean not focus on the Spirit as such, but on the Son, crucified and risen, Savior and Lord of all. Ethical life will be neither narrowly, individualistically conceived nor legalistically expressed, but will be joyously communal…. But this means that our theologizing must stop paying mere lip service to the Spirit and recognize his crucial role in Pauline theology; and it means that the church must risk freeing the Spirit from being boxed into the creed and getting him back into the experienced life of the believer and the believing community” (902).